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Why I Hate Math

Whenever I play with my calculator, I get depressed

John Egelkrout
7 min readSep 6, 2022
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I confess I hate math. It’s not that I find it difficult or confusing, it’s just that if I focus on the wrong things, I get depressed.

In school, I always enjoyed working out problems and getting the correct answer. As a young adult, I even liked working out a budget on a spreadsheet so that I could meet my financial obligations. Math was never a problem for me until I started playing with numbers instead of working with them.

Most people don’t spend much time playing with numbers. Playing with numbers and working with numbers are not the same thing. Today I am playing with numbers, not for any particular reason, but just for something to do. I may regret this.

Here are some things I found.

There are approximately 50,000 homeless veterans. If each of these homeless veterans was given their own apartment for a year at a cost of $800 per month, it would cost $480 million, or about one-fourth of one day’s Defense Department budget of $750 billion. One-fourth of one day is 6 hours!!! 6 hours of the Defense Department budget would house all 50,000 homeless vets in their own $800/month apartment for a year.

Why are there homeless vets at all?

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John Egelkrout
John Egelkrout

Written by John Egelkrout

I am a sanity-curious former teacher who writes about politics, social issues, memoirs, and a variety of other topics. You can also follow me on Substack.

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